# GreekBarRetrieval: A Benchmark for Greek Statutory Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18752 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18752/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Interleaving Retrieval with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Knowledge-Intensive Multi-Step Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10509/) (2022)
- [LegalBench-RAG: A Benchmark for Retrieval-Augmented Generation in the Legal Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10343/) (2024)
- [A Statutory Article Retrieval Dataset in French](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11792/) (2021)
- [LeCaRDv2: A Large-Scale Chinese Legal Case Retrieval Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17609/) (2023)
- [A Reasoning-Focused Legal Retrieval Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03970/) (2025)
- [IL-TUR: Benchmark for Indian Legal Text Understanding and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05399/) (2024)
- [GreekBarBench: A Challenging Benchmark for Free-Text Legal Reasoning and Citations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17267/) (2025)
- [nigam@COLIEE-22: Legal Case Retrieval and Entailment using Cascading of Lexical and Semantic-based models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07853/) (2022)
- [NLP for The Greek Language: A Longer Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10962/) (2024)
- [GuRE:Generative Query REwriter for Legal Passage Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12950/) (2025)
- [The Massive Legal Embedding Benchmark (MLEB)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19365/) (2025)
- [THUIR@COLIEE-2020: Leveraging Semantic Understanding and Exact Matching for Legal Case Retrieval and Entailment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13102/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Tool-calling retrieval versus vector RAG for a small Greek--English knowledge base: accuracy and robustness to how users type Greek](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.08205/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Statutory retrieval is necessary for citation-grounded legal question answering, but remains underexplored for Greek. We introduce GreekBarRetrieval, a public retrieval benchmark derived from, and complementing GreekBarBench, which did not include retrieval. The new benchmark comprises 283 bar-exam questions, each accompanied by the facts of the case it refers to, and 6,308 candidate statutory articles to retrieve from. Questions and facts are stated in everyday language, but need to be mapped to the formal terminology of statutes and their abstract legal concepts. A further complication is that not all of the case facts are relevant to each question of a case. Experimenting with three BM25 variants and nine dense retrievers, we find that vanilla dense retrieval far outperforms vanilla sparse retrieval in Recall@100. However, LLM-based query reformulation helps BM25 close that gap, while also improving dense retrieval. With a ten-round ReAct-like LLM reformulation loop that we introduce, BM25 improves further in Recall@100 and obtains the best nDCG and MAP scores of all tested retrievers. Query reformulation also outperforms pseudo-relevance feedback, sparse-dense fusion, and English translation.